Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies

by Edited by Gary King , Ori Rosen , Martin A. Tanner

• ISBN13: 9780521835138
• ISBN10: 0521835135
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-09-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Drawing upon the recent explosion of research in the field, a diverse group of scholars surveys the latest strategies for solving ecological inference problems, the process of trying to infer individual behavior from aggregate data. The uncertainties and information lost in aggregation make ecological inference one of the most difficult areas of statistical inference, but these inferences are required in many academic fields, as well as by legislatures and the Courts in redistricting, marketing research by business, and policy analysis by governments. This wide-ranging collection of essays offers many fresh and important contributions to the study of ecological inference.

Table of Contents

Introduction: information in ecological inference: an introduction Gary King, Ori Rosen and Martin A. Tanner

Part I: 1. Prior and likelihood choices in the analysis of ecological data Jonathan C. Wakefield

2. Information in aggregate data David G. Steel, Eric J. Beh and Raymond Lourenco Chambers

3. Using ecological inference for contextual research: when aggregation bias is the solution as well as the problem D. Stephen Voss

Part II: 4. Extending King's ecological inference model to multiple elections using Markov chain Monte Carlo Jeffry B. Lewis

5. Ecological regression and ecological inference Bernard Grofman and Samuel Merrill

6. Using prior information to aid ecological inference: a Bayesian approach J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht

7. An information theoretic approach to ecological estimation and inference George G. Judge, Douglas J. Miller and Wendy K. Tam Cho

8. Ecological panel inference from repeated cross sections Rob Eisinga, Ben Pelzer and Philip Hans B. F. Franses

Part III: 9. Multi-party split-ticket voting estimation as an ecological inference problem Kenneth R. Benoit, Michael Laver and Daniela Giannetti

10. Ecological inference in the presence of temporal dependence Kevin M. Quinn

11. A spatial view of the ecological inference problem Carol A. Gotway and Linda J. Young

12. Places and relationships in ecological inference: uncovering contextual effects through a geographically weighted autoregressive model Ernesto Calvo and Marcelo Escolar

13. Ecological inference incorporating spatial dependence Sebastien Haneuse and Jonathan C. Wakefield

Part IV: 14. A common framework for ecological inference in epidemiology, political science and sociology Ruth E. Salway and Jonathan C. Wakefield

15. A structured comparison of the Goodman regression, the truncated normal, and the binomial-beta hierarchical methods for ecological inference Rogé

rio Silva de Mattos and Á

lvaro Veiga

16. A comparison of the numerical properties of ei methods Micah Altman, Jeff Gill and Michael P. McDonald.